


open your heart to my hands, i'll be waiting

by andibeth82



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flashbacks, Natasha Feels, POV Natasha Romanov, Partnership, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-12 15:41:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1190604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha Romanov learns about love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	open your heart to my hands, i'll be waiting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CloudAtlas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/gifts).



> Written for the **be_compromised** 2014 Valentine's Promptathon: _Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won’t. This is what love is. [Welcome to Night Vale]_
> 
> [My own liberties taken with Natasha's age in the MCUverse. Which maybe I'll figure out a reasonable headcanon for, one day, if the movies don't do it first.]
> 
> Unbeta'ed, all mistakes mine.

Natalia Romanova learns about love when she’s five years old, when her father is reading bedtime stories of Russian princesses and smoothing back red (but not too red) hair from her heavy eyes and telling her, “spat, Natal'ya. Sna moy krasivuyu devushku.”

_Sleep, Natalia. Sleep, my beautiful girl._

His hands against her skin are a comfort against a child’s world of big and bad and she falls asleep dreaming of golden haired maidens, white unicorns and prima donna ballerinas, she never tells anyone that those are her last real memories of a life before becoming unmade, memories that - when she lets herself think about them - seem too beautiful to even be real.

 

***

 

Natasha Romanov learns about love when she’s twelve years old, when Ivan takes her aside and strokes her arm and smiles in a way that Natasha’s sure is not exactly meant for her, but there’s no else in the room and no one else who has his attention, so she eventually decides it must be.

“My little killer,” he says softly as he places a sharpened knife in her hand, opening his arm while she opens throats, innocent bodies spread across the floor like strewn dirty laundry, empty eyes and faces that once begged for mercy and forgiveness.

It is her rite and she moves methodically, willingly at his word, dispatches with skill at the job she was trained to do, the job she was forced to do, silencing the voice in her head that drives her to complete her work with perfection and vigor. When it’s all over, she stands in place and drops the knife to the ground, her hands and clothes stained with red. She wipes the back of her palm across her forehead, a bloody smear, a war wound that will scar over in the wake of being scrubbed clean and will run deep for years to come. Ivan walks up and smiles, silent and approving and cold.

“My little killer.”

He runs his hand down her stomach, his finger dancing over a bare expanse of skin, before leaning close to her ear, his voice low and barely above a whisper.

“Always remember, Natalia. Love is a debt.”

She never forgets.

 

***

 

Natasha Romanov learns about love when she’s fifteen years old. They call him the Winter Soldier, he seeks her out among a sea of girls with knives and guns, he trains her to be the best and then to be better than the best. He gives her the same thing as Ivan but somehow, it’s different, and they fight together and kill together and sleep together, bound by their devotion to their cause and their talents and their ability to understand each other’s needs and wants better than anyone else.

But then one day Natasha’s mind is wiped for yet another time, and she forgets faces and masks and metal arms and anything she might have learned about love and what it means, another memory lost to a landfill of broken dreams, another memory replaced with an empty canvas, blank white spaces where her past should be.

 

***

 

Natasha Romanov learns about love when she’s twenty-seven, when a man with short hair and a narrow gaze and a collection of arrows throws himself in front of her and takes a bullet to the stomach, and for the first time the red is too personal and too much and too real and she doesn’t know what to do.

She holds his hand and talks senselessly to keep him awake. She jokes that if he dies on her, she’ll have to recount an embarrassing story in front of every agent and he’ll never be taken seriously ever again. She holds his body as if her life depends on it (it does), trying with strength she doesn’t have to push the red back where it belongs, even as it flows freely from the gaping hole in his flesh. She lets only medical personnel come near him and fights off anyone else who tries to tear her away.

She does the only things she knows how to do, and hopes to god that it’s enough.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she says when he finally wakes up, and she’s so relieved that she has to fight to keep from throwing herself onto the hospital bed. She settles for entwining her fingers tight with his own as he reaches over, smiling weakly when he sees her face and eyes that are too bright for her normal state.

“I don’t care.”

The desperation of his indifference unsettles her, unlocking a fear that slices through her chest like a knife, and she wrenches her hand away angrily.

“This is not love, Clint. We don’t _do_ love, we can’t be those people.” She folds her arms tightly, as if trying to close herself off to the feelings that have been eating away at the edges of her heart for longer than she wants to admit, slowly wearing holes in the recesses of scarred, tough skin. She swallows down tears she didn’t know she could cry.

“Love is dangerous.”

“Yes,” Clint replies quietly, looking down at his injuries, and when he finds her eyes again there’s an exhaustion that’s settled in his gaze. He squeezes her hand, the rough callouses of his thumb a blanket of comfort against her skin, and they both let their tears fall at the same time.

“Yes, Natasha. It is.”

 

***

 

“This is what love is,” her father said, a last goodbye that he didn’t really plan.

_(“This is what love is,” Clint says, when he’s holding her in his arms, and when he’s apologizing for almost shooting her, and when he’s sitting by her hospital bed, a scene in reverse, pleading for her to open her eyes.)_

“This is what love is,” Ivan said, because he liked his girls, and he liked his killers, and he liked Natasha most of all.

_(“This is what love is,” Clint says, when he’s naked inside of her, when he’s telling her she’s worth it, when he’s saving her at the expense of his own death and morals.)_

“This is what love is,” the Winter Soldier said, because they needed each other to be red now and red always, and only they knew what that red could mean and could be.

“This is what love is,” Clint says when he lies beside her and shares stories of his past, his father beating him and his days in the circus, when she tells him about the men she’s killed and the red she’s spilled. And it’s only then, after all of that, sitting across from each other in the quinjet on the way to another mission, watching him crack his crooked smile after a conversation that needs no words, that she finally feels like she understands the way love can be both debt and curse, the way it can bind in the same way it can undo, the way it can save as well as demolish.

She falls asleep beside him, promises him her heart, promises it when no one’s looking and waits for the day when she might be able to say it. He holds her in his arms and promises her his soul, promises it when they can’t reconcile who she’s become, to him a partner but to others still a menace, a chained monster fighting against a world that threatens to beat her down.

_“This is what love is.”_

This is the only love Natasha has ever known, but it’s enough.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1839994) by [I_llbedammned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_llbedammned/pseuds/I_llbedammned)




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